Aussie troubadour weaves musical magic on cross-Canada tour

Australia’s most famous musical export may well be the diesel-fueled power rock of AC/DC, but there’s another facet to the country’s musical landscape.

Whether it’s the country’s profound isolation at the bottom of the world, or the immensity of its empty spaces, Down Under seems to inspire a particularly haunting, reflective style of songwriting as heard in the work of singer-songwriters like Gotye and Colin Hay and groups like Midnight Oil and Crowded House.

Now, that list can be added to with the name of Jordie Lane.

The 26-year-old Melbourne native more than capably carries the standard forward as he embarks on his first Canadian tour at Toronto’s Dakota Lounge Thursday night — alongside local singer-songwriter Jadea Kelly — and weekend performances at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Regina, Edmonton, Vancouver and Calgary Folk Festival shows will follow.

Lane has been on the road almost constantly for the past eight years, backpacking around Southeast Asia, touring his native Australia and living rough in the Mojave Desert.

During this time, he has produced three albums including the latest, Blood Thinner, which was partly recorded on a portable four-track during a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree National Park, chasing the spirit of his musical hero, country legend Gram Parsons.

This restless lifestyle fuels Lane’s song craft, which speaks with the plaintiveness, the poignancy, the melancholy and the eternal optimism of the leather-worn wanderer, fueled by his experiences on this voyage across three continents.

“Lost Along the Way” is a mournful ode to a sweetheart thousands of miles away; “Room 8” is about the night he spent in the motel room where Gram Parsons died; “Hollywood’s Got a Hold” is a comic piece with a massive sing-along chorus about trying to buy a sandwich in suburban L.A. — and stumbling into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Lane also sometimes draws on literature or local folklore: “Black Diamond”is a haunting ballad about the ghost of a small town prostitute killed in a mine explosion and interred in a tavern cellar; “I Could Die Looking at You,” off 2009’s Sleeping Patterns album, is a seemingly straightforward love song that doubles as a tribute to the legendary Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson.

Lane will be joined for part of his Canadian tour by Clare Reynolds, a Brisbane singer-songwriter who backs him up on an assortment of percussion instruments, including an amplified guitar case.

The pair sing shimmering and flawless harmonies together. Instrumentation is spare but there’s an onstage intensity that’s reminiscent of a Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova show.

Despite all his globetrotting, Lane is settled in Los Angeles these days. Not surprisingly, there’s a deep vein of Americana running through his music. His deft guitar work and plaintive singing pay tribute to a long tradition of dusty, road-weary American troubadours that includes Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

Like those legends, Lane’s songwriting is haunting and spare, built on a bare bones foundation of deft guitar picking and his lone soaring voice. The combination evokes a sense of restless longing, an impatience to be on the road combined with a yearning for people and places left behind, for missed experiences and for memories that are slowly beginning to fade.

Growing up in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury, an unremarkable neighbourhood whose very ordinariness sparked his creative imagination, Lane perfected his songwriting skills while never straying from home.

“In a funny way, it was being stuck in one place that first inspired me,” he says. “I began to be fascinated with country music and the myth of the wandering troubadour.

It’s that classic thing — that yearning for something you don’t have, for experiences that you’ve only had in your mind.”

At 19 years of age, Lane traveled to Vietnam and the culture shock hit the insulated suburban kid like a revelation.

“I realized, in a way that hit me quite emotionally, that I had had an incredibly privileged upbringing,” he reflects. “I was singing about ‘Poor me, I’m missing my girlfriend’ while I was seeing Vietnamese kids who were living in a total post-war scenario, kids who had to scramble to get money any way they could.”

“War Rages On” is the product of that experience — an ode to inequality that invokes the street hustlers, lady-boys and opium addicts of Saigon.

Packed with stark images and memorable characters, Lane’s songs unfold like the well-thumbed pages of a battered photo album.

Perhaps that’s why, despite the obvious deference he pays to his folk-music mentors, he considers his greatest influence to be a landscape photographer.

“I’ve always been fascinated with Ansel Adams. He worked entirely in a black-and-white medium but managed to recreate the whole spectrum —the blackest of blacks and the whitest of whites — within those limits.

Adams was able to tell an epic story in a single image. I’m trying to do the same thing with my music — to compress a whole life into a single frame.”

Lane’s music isn’t easy to categorize. Fundamentally, it’s the craft of storytelling — his ability to draw a compelling narrative out of a single inconspicuous detail — that defines his work better than any genre label could.

“You write a song and hopefully that song is strong enough that it dictates what style of song it wants to be. If I identified with a particular genre I think I’d feel trapped.

I don’t necessarily plan to always play the same style of music but I plan to keep telling stories.”